September 28, 2012

Doing the Theramore scenario was a strange experience. As a piece of gameplay, I loved it. It was dynamic and challenging with a faster flow than the cc, pull, position, fight, heal up, move on staccato of dungeons. Coordinating with two other people was much easier than with four others and the scenario allowed multiple ways of accomplishing the same goals. I can’t wait to do more scenarios

As an experience for my characters, it was horrifying. My Alliance characters arrived at the scene of a horrible attack too late to do anything but stop it from getting any worse. By the end I felt like we had achieved nothing. (Yes, I know there’s some mumbo-jumbo about a focusing doohickey, but that has no emotional impact. I shouldn’t have to read a novel in order to understand what’s going on in my game.) It felt like one more crushing defeat for the incompetent Alliance. When I got home I checked my mail and got a tabard for a bombed-out hole in the ground. Great.

My Horde characters ran roughshod over the Alliance as usual and all was fine until the end. When the smug blood elf (really, do they come in any other variety?) explained about how our assault was nothing but a diversion for the real attack with a weapon of mass destruction, I felt both sick at the thought of what I had helped set in motion and angry that all the hard work I had just done had in the end been meaningless. I was not a proud warrior fighting for my people, I was the patsy in some warmonger’s game. I got home, checked my mail, and got a toy bomb. It made me sick to my stomach.

I suppose Blizzard could say that they wanted to provoke an emotional reaction, and they did, but I won’t be playing Theramore again soon, if ever. That’s not what I want in my games.

September 24, 2012

All kidding aside, Cataclysm was not a bad expansion. There are some things that didn’t turn out well, and Blizzard has been up front about acknowledging them, but there have been a lot of good things in the past expansion, too. Still it’s been almost two years of a world on fire, and we’re ready for something new, like bouncy pandas kung-fu-ing their way through lush bamboo forests. If the snark has been flowing a little heavily lately (and not just from me), that’s just the WoW world getting its collective jones on for the new shiny. It’s the night before a new expansion and waiting for midnight is like waiting for Christmas morning. All of this has happened before. All of this will happen again. But probably not with pandas.

This is it, the last of AFR’s Cataclysm retrospective. Thank you so much for joining me as we wait for Mists of Pandaria to arrive. May your stores be open and your downloads problem-free. Good luck, and I’ll see you in Pandaria.